Pilothouse: Amazon White Paper

The Pilothouse approach to Amazon ads is rooted in two fundamental goals: Visibility and Control. By implementing an organized campaign structure that provides granular visibility into the sources of sales, marketers can swiftly identify successful strategies. However, visibility alone is insufficient without the control to implement changes that enhance campaign performance.

A well-organized campaign suite should empower marketers to quickly assess performance, make data-informed decisions, and take decisive actions. Our campaign organization is meticulously detailed to the extent that even those unfamiliar with Amazon advertising can grasp the dynamics of the ad account.

Well-structured campaign names significantly streamline management and offer an immediate overview of top-performing segments. As mentioned earlier, visibility plays a pivotal role in effective campaign management. Practical application of consistent naming conventions enables quick searches, such as locating all Sponsored Brand Video campaigns by searching for "SBV," or identifying campaigns targeting vegan keywords by searching for "Vegan."

Our standard naming convention is as follows:

By taking a quick look, you can assess the performance of a segment and make informed decisions to address any underperforming areas or capitalize on successful ones. In addition to employing effective naming conventions, we also utilize Portfolios as an additional layer of segmentation. This proves particularly beneficial for competitor campaigns, where you can create a Competitor Portfolio and incorporate the actual competitor brand names in your campaign names. This approach allows you to have a comprehensive overview of all campaigns or easily search for performance against a specific competitor.

Within each ad type, we create a range of campaigns strategically designed to cover all ad placements, providing the necessary visibility and control to drive optimal performance. The campaign structure is illustrated in the accompanying images; however, it's worth noting that we typically introduce an additional level of segmentation based on niche. As evident, this approach results in a substantial number of campaigns, underscoring the importance of maintaining an organized keyword research sheet and adhering to effective naming conventions.

Generic High Volume:

These campaigns are also known as ranking campaigns. These are a tiny subset of the highest-volume keywords that currently make sense to target. For example, if you are brand new to the Amazon platform and are lacking reviews and brand establishment, it is not advisable to pursue the most highly sought-after keyword with significant search volume. Instead, begin your ‘ranking’ campaigns with mid to low-volume keywords. As you gain relevance and visibility, these campaigns transition into evergreen campaigns, while new ranking campaigns target higher-level keywords.

Although ranking campaigns are typically not profitable, their primary purpose is to enhance the rank and relevance of your top keywords.

Branded Defense:

Amazon takes every opportunity to sell ad space, which unfortunately means that even when a customer actively searches for our product, they are presented with a wide array of alternatives. To counter this and provide the best customer experience, employing aggressive defense strategies is crucial. This involves targeting all branded terms through sponsored product ads (including ASINs) and sponsored brand ads, ensuring that your products are prominently displayed when customers search for your terms.

Moreover, by targeting your own ASINs, you can occupy all the sponsored placements on your listings, preventing customers from diverting to a competitor after you've invested considerable effort (and likely paid for the click) to bring them to your listing in the first place.

The recommended approach for branded ASIN targeting is to set relatively low bids while applying a significant product page "placement" percentage modifier (typically exceeding 300-400%+). This combination ensures that these campaigns primarily appear on product pages since ASIN targeting has the potential to show up in search results.

Auto Campaigns:

Auto campaigns serve as effective prospecting campaigns, but their usage should be limited to that purpose. While auto campaigns can generate a substantial number of sales, they lack the granular control over individual keywords necessary for efficient scaling. By transitioning successful keywords from auto campaigns to Exact and Phrase match, you gain precise bid control over those specific keywords, allowing for better efficiency as you scale your advertising efforts.

By conducting comprehensive keyword research beforehand, you can launch your auto campaigns with aggressive negative keywords. This restricts their freedom to discover only new keywords that were not uncovered during the initial keyword research phase. Once an auto campaign identifies a converting keyword, it should be promoted to Exact or Phrase match and negated from the auto campaign.

Typically, our auto campaigns represent less than 10% of the total ad spend, ideally staying below 5%.

Our first step with this brand was to establish a strong branded defense by targeting branded terms as well as our own ASINs. We then conducted thorough KW research, segmenting KWs based on similarity and search volume (including an in-depth Negative KW list to help refine our reach). By focusing on low and medium-search volume KWs first, we were able to gain both efficiency and scale before targeting more competitive (higher volume) keywords.

We then identified gaps in competitors' branded defense – allowing us to take over our biggest competitor's branded search results. Lastly, to try and mitigate any wasted ad spend, we set up remarketing campaigns to target customers who had viewed our products over the last 30, 60, and 90 days.

All these initiatives together allowed us to 8X the account while still maintaining high efficiency for the client.

Following a successful launch, we faced inventory challenges, resulting in inconsistent sales during the first 4 months. To address this, we optimized our advertising strategy by reducing spend on product campaigns with high cost-per-clicks and low conversion rates. Once inventory became less of an obstacle, we implemented aggressive advertising approaches for our best-selling products. This included launching generic keyword prospecting campaigns, competitor targeting campaigns, and branded campaigns for both keywords and ASINs. By identifying top-performing campaigns early on and pushing spend into them, we were able to rapidly scale while maintaining this brand's goal of a 3.00+ T-ROAS.

Through deep segmentation of campaigns into small groupings, and smart campaign naming structure and conventions - we were able to quickly identify winning segments and scale them appropriately. If many keywords were lumped together in a campaign (or effectively the same was done using broad match/auto-targeting), then individual keywords that could be strong performers are only allowed a much smaller share of spend, and their growth potential is likely missed.

This level of segmentation is what allowed us to 4X this partner's revenue while maintaining relatively stable efficiency.

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What’s Inside

1. Our Approach

2. Strategic Keyword Segmentation

3. Effective Naming Conventions

5. Case Studies

4. Optimized Campaign Structure

6. Pilothouse's FREE Amazon PPC Checklist

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Our Approach

Strategic Keyword Segmentation

Effective Naming Conventions

Organized Campaign Structure

Amazon Case Studies

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Health & Personal Care

Tools & Home Improvement

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